After graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering, Tomas Van den Hauwe was offered a PhD position at VUB and was then recruited to work for Apple in California.
My name's Tomas Van den Hauwe, I grew up and went to school in Aalst, and I graduated from VUB in 2008 as Master in Electrical Engineering. I have an older brother Mickaël, who studied commercial engineering at VUB. My mom, who just retired last month, spent her whole professional life at the medical faculty of VUB in Jette.
Like a lot of engineering students, I started to think about my master's thesis near the end of my senior year, and the choice for me was really between the ELEC and ETRO departments. In the ETRO department, prof. Kuijk had a group of 3 PhD students working on an indirect time-of-flight (iToF) CMOS sensor + camera, with the ambition of potentially starting a spin-off company a couple of years later. I guess I was excited equally by the technology, the group of people, and the prospect of starting a company, so I started my master's thesis, which was about circuits for a specific type of iToF pixel, with prof. Kuijk.
After I graduated, I started as PhD student with this group, while in parallel we were starting our spin-off company called Optrima. That company grew quickly, and pretty soon we were taking up a big chunk of the floorspace of the ETRO department on the 5th floor of building K. In 2010, we merged with another Brussels-based company called Softkinetic, and we kept that name. This was also when we moved to another building across from the VUB campus on the Pleinlaan. Finally, in the fall of 2015, Sony acquired Softkinetic.
I never really planned to move abroad, but when Apple contacted me I was curious enough to respond and see where it would lead.
I was contacted by an Apple recruiter on LinkedIn in early 2015. I never really planned to move abroad, but when Apple contacted me I was curious enough to respond and see where it would lead. At the time, there weren't that many companies doing iToF, or even depth sensing for that matter, so I was lucky enough to have worked on a very specific technology that started to garner interest from the big tech companies. I had multiple phone interviews, followed by an in-person interview in London. After I passed that one, suddenly the possibility of moving to California became very real.
Unfortunately I struggled to get a visa, which was simply bad luck because there were quota and a lottery system and I didn't get picked in 2015 and 2016. Right around the time my wife (then girlfriend) and I started to think we should give up on our American ambitions and focus on our lives in Belgium (we had been holding off on buying a house, among other things), in summer of 2016, Apple contacted me again with the proposal of attempting to get a different type of visa, with more strict requirements on professional and academic achievements but no lottery. Fortunately enough I was able to get that visa and I quit Softkinetic and moved to California end of March 2017. That year was very tumultuous. Between March and September, I quit what was essentially my first job and started a new one. I moved internationally, and actually moved two more times, and I got married!
What I really liked was that our group of engineering students was relatively small, so there were a lot of opportunities for discussions with professors and TAs.
At Apple, I first joined the depth hardware team, which is the team behind the FaceID hardware, the so-called TrueDepth camera. The project that I've personally spent most of my time on so far is the LiDAR scanner in the recently released iPad Pro. After some internal re-organization last year, I'm now part of the camera architecture team, so the scope of my work has broadened to include both depth and RGB cameras. I lead a team of 11 people, mostly with backgrounds in optical engineering and computer science.
Studying at VUB wasn't really a choice I made myself, as my mom worked at VUB and my brother had gone to study there before me. Knowing what I know now though, I think I'd probably choose VUB. What I really liked was that our group of engineering students was relatively small, so there were a lot of opportunities for discussions with professors and TA's, very personalized education if you will. Actually, I majored in electronics, as part of a group of only five students with the same curriculum.
Look for something that you're passionate about, that excites you.
My advice for future graduates looking to apply for jobs in engineering? I guess I may not be the best person to ask, as I've been so fortunate that I've never had to look for a job so far. But I would say, look for something that you're passionate about, that excites you. Think about what motivates you, and make sure you pick something that has that. Don't overthink your career path or plan, and don't shy away from opportunities. I think if you deliver good work, people will notice and new opportunities will present themselves. And finally, in your work, don't get bogged down by details and your inbox, cut out the noise and make efficient use of your time, working on the things that create value. And keep learning.
I ask myself every once in a while what’s next for me in my career path, but I haven't found a good answer yet. My wife and I assume that eventually we'll move back to Belgium, or at least Europe. On the one hand, I feel like it would make sense to do something where I can leverage my experience from working at Apple, and my experience with camera technologies, but in Europe that probably wouldn't be in the consumer space. On the other hand, maybe by the time I get there I want to do something totally new and leave cameras behind me. In the meantime though, I have a lot of opportunities for exciting work at Apple, and I definitely have at least a couple of big projects ahead of me before I'd really start thinking what's next.